Aerosmith were one of the most popular hard rock bands of the ’70s, setting the style and sound of hard rock and heavy metal for the next two decades with their raunchy, bluesy swagger. The Boston-based quintet found the middle ground between the menace of the Rolling Stones and the campy, sleazy flamboyance of the New York Dolls, developing a lean, dirty riff-oriented boogie that was loose and swinging and as hard as a diamond.Read More

Back in 1997, Led Zeppelin released BBC Sessions, the band’s first attempt to chronicle its heavily bootlegged live recordings for the British Broadcasting Corporation. That double-disc set didn’t contain all of Zep’s BBC Sessions: a full nine songs from 1969 were left behind, including three songs recorded in March — a session highlighted by the otherwise unavailable original “Sunshine Woman” — that were believed to be lost. The 2016 triple-disc set The Complete BBC Sessions adds those songs as a third disc to a remastered version of the original 1997 compilationRead More

The Definitive Rock Collection is the latest compilation album by White Lion, released in 2007 by Atlantic Records. The ultimate collection of studio and live ‘White Lion’ tracks. The compilation features all of White Lion’s charted singles.Read More

Poison’s Greatest Hits 1986-1996 is as definitive as a Poison compilation could hope to be. Featuring a full 18 tracks, including all of their Top 50 hits (“Talk Dirty to Me,” “I Want Action,” “Nothin’ but a Good Time,” “Fallen Angel,” “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” “Your Mama Don’t Dance,” “Unskinny Bop,” “Something to Belive In,” “Stand,” among others) plus two unreleased cuts (“Sexual Thing,” “Lay Your Body Down”)Read More

In many ways, Def Leppard were the definitive hard rock band of the ’80s. There were many bands that rocked harder (and were more dangerous) than the Sheffield-based quintet, but few others captured the spirit of the times quite as well. Emerging in the late ’70s as part of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, Def Leppard actually owed more to the glam rock and metal of the early ’70s, as their sound was equal parts T. Rex, Mott the Hoople, Queen, and Led Zeppelin.Read More

It’s been a long 16 years since Bon Jovi was last compiled, when Cross Road arrived for the holiday season of 1994, two years after Keep the Faith capped off a near-decade long run of dominance for the Jersey rockers. As it turned out, it was the first act of Bon Jovi’s career.Read More

Red, White & Crüe is an anthology album by the heavy metal band Mötley Crüe, released on February 1, 2005 by Mötley Records and charted at number 6 on The Billboard 200. To coincide with the album’s release, the band reunited with drummer Tommy Lee, who left the band in 1999. Bassist Nikki Sixx commented on the band’s reunion, comparing it to “seeing Mike Tyson fight.Read More

Live In Long Beach 1976”, is part of earMUSIC’s DEEP PURPLE / DPO reissue series that, over the last couple years, has seen the release of rare live material from the band, including Copenhagen 1972, Stockholm 1970, Paris 1975, Graz 1975 and Long Beach 1971. “Live In Long Beach 1976” features one of the very rare shows where the MK IV line up (Bolin – Coverdale – Hughes – Lord – Paice) performance was recorded live.Read More

This after-the-fact compilation from one of the last hard rock bands to make any sort of impression before the alt-rock revolution made most of it meaningless does its job, limited as it is, fairly well. All the hit singles that Sebastian Bach and company cranked out during their brief run of superstardomRead More

With only four full-length albums and a couple of live records to their name, it’s hard to view this 2006 two-disc Cinderella set as being essential, especially as the thorough Rocked, Wired & Bluesed: The Greatest Hits was released early the preceding year.Read More

While quite a few arena rock acts of the ’70s found the transformation into the ’80s quite difficult, several acts continued to flourish and enjoyed some of their biggest commercial success: Journey, Styx, REO Speedwagon, and especially Foreigner. Foreigner’s leader from the beginning has been British guitarist Mick Jones, who first broke into the music biz as a “hired gun” of sorts, appearing on recordings by George Harrison and Peter Frampton, and as part of a later-day version of hard rockers Spooky Tooth. By the mid-’70s, Jones had relocated to New York City, where he was a brief member of the Leslie West Band and served as an A&R man for a record company.Read More